Tag: Brown-winged kingfisher

We were in Bitarkanika National Park on 19 and 20 March. Everyone said that it was pretty late in the season and our sightings would be minimal. It was true that most of the winter migrants had left. Still the area is so rich in bird life that in three outings in the small area between Khola and Dangamal villages we saw eighty two species. Eighty one of them are listed here. The one I haven’t yet been able to identify is the slate and red bird in the photo below.

Contrary to the advise of some experienced birdwatchers, I’d expected this. My confidence was based on the comprehensive checklist published a decade ago which was a result of G.V. Gopi’s thesis work. This work listed a very large number of endemic species. Gopi put me in touch with the people whom he met during his field work, and that helped us enormously.

We had several lifers (marked in bold) and saw a few of the species which are globally threatened (marked with a star). Some of the birds I have written about in other posts; they are linked. Interestingly, every species we saw is included in Gopi’s checklist!

The list leaves out birds which we heard but did not see. These include not only the ubiquitous Indian Koel and the Common Hawk-Cuckoo (more widely known as the Brain Fever bird, due to its call), but also a couple of owls and a nightjar.

Bhitarkanika has several avian habitats. The area that we visited (coloured red in the map here) is reputed to be best for kingfishers and the pitta. Closer to the sea one should see the gulls and terns which we missed completely. There are also multiple viewing season. The time we visited is the leanest. Soon after the end of the monsoon one should be able to see herons nesting. The winter months will bring in the migrants, so loved by bird watchers in India. All this is in addition to the views of saltwater crocodiles, sea turtles and monitor lizards which this place is famous for.

I end this post with a mention of the most unlikely sight we saw: a monitor lizard being harried by a flock of Green Bee-eaters. The monitor lizard was probably interrupted in its search for eggs in the nests which the Bee-eaters build on the ground. These birds do not usually flock. They came together to harry the lizard, and successfully drover it away. I was so taken up by the events that I forgot I had a camera. You see wonderful things when you are in a forest.

After reaching the Bhitarkanika National Park, we learnt that the brown-winged kingfisher is called the king of the forest. It was abundant. The flash of its orange and blue colouration easily visible, and often, in the green of the mangrove forest. This was one of the seven species of kingfishers we saw in a day.

So many species gave me some pause. How did they evolve? How are they connected? The current understanding of the evolution of kingfishers is that they probably radiated from southern Asia, speciating rapidly as they filled new niches in Australia and the Pacific islands. The Americas are likely to have been populated through two independent migrations from the Old World landmass. Studies are incomplete, and especially in the biogeographic ranges of Asia and India there is much that remains to be discovered.

There are three major clades of Kingfishers: Alcedininae (river kingfishers), Halcyoninae (tree kingfishers), and Cerylinae (water kingfishers). All three are present in Bhitarkanika national park. As far as we can tell today, the river kingfishers diverged from the base of the evolutionary tree. The branching between the other two clades came later. The small blue kingfisher (Alcedo atthis), the white-breasted kingfisher and the pied kingfisher, representatives of the three clades are widespread in India. Somehow I didn’t have a good photo of pied kingfishers before, and I managed to get a fairly good one on this trip (below).

Here are the seven species we saw, listed in the three clades. The name in italics is the genus to which the different species belong.

We’d seen stork billed kingfishers during our trip to Andaman in December. They did not seem to be particularly common there. They seemed to be even more rare here. We saw one briefly sitting with a pair of brown-winged kingfishers. They have similar bright orange coloration, with long red beaks, and it takes a moment to realize that the stork billed does not have a brown wing. I did not get a photo here at all. The ruddy kingfisher is seldom spotted here. One of the cooks at the hotel we stayed in was very interested in birds, and kept asking us whether we’d seen this. He told us that he has never managed to spot it. This agrees with Gopi’s checklist, which states that it is a vagrant. We never saw one.

I’d first seen the collared kingfisher in Andaman. They are quite common here, and I managed to get a better photo than I’d got in December (above). It took me some time to spot the black-capped kingfisher. Our boatman, Amar, kept pointing them out to us, and I couldn’t see them at all for a while. Then I realized that they flit between the dipping branches of mangroves and the water. After that I caught sight of many. Eventually, the best photograph was of one which sat on a mooring pole for boats (alongside). The splash of lilac near the base of its tail is barely visible when it is perched, but is a beautiful sight when it flies.

Which part of Bhitarkanika is best for sighting of kingfishers? We found that the backwaters between the jetty in Khola village and Dangamal is a great place for these birds. We spotted all seven species in a single one hour boat ride between these points. You can also see them almost anywhere near the waters.